Book Review: Carnival in Rio, by Steve Kaffen (Reviewed by N. Waheed Nasser)

If there’s one word that describes Steve Kaffen’s latest book, Carnival in Rio, it’s “joyous.” Using narrative, stories, and striking photography, he presents what he calls “one of the world’s great spectacles” including its samba parades, street parties, championship soccer, and local color. He adds excursions along the coast and a journey into the Amazon rainforest, plus a section to help readers plan their Carnival visits.

The coverage is complete due to his timing. He arrives a week early and observes the start-up excitement. “Carnival is a time when positive emotions dwarf life’s frustrations…. Everyone sports a costume, even if it’s a cute crown or an outrageous hat or shirt or, popular with children, sneakers flashing multi-colored lights.” He remains past the end and describes city life reverting to normal.

He stays in three interesting areas: Copacabana, Ipanema, and Botafogo. Copacabana, he says, is famous for its beach and for its open-air cafes serving cafezinho, “an extra-dark drip coffee served in a small glass.” He bursts out laughing in the metro as he imagines actor John Wayne stroll up to a café counter and in his no-nonsense voice, bellow out, “Gimme a cafezinho.” The hundred-year-old Copacabana Palace Hotel hosts Carnival’s major social event, the Magic Ball. The required attire is formal or costume, and his photo of a man draped in a cape filled with tiny, glittering light bulbs seems perfect for a Carnival grand ball.

You can tell that he feels at home in Ipanema. His writing and photos exude warmth and familiarity as he takes us to his favorite morning cafe, the local supermarket for a snack package of sliced papaya, pineapple, and watermelon for the beach, and the restaurant Garota de Ipanema, where “The Girl from Ipanema” song was written. He seems to like breakfast with personality and in Botafogo, there’s the Slow Bakery, “which takes its time in creating the toasted breads that accompany the strong coffee,” and Emporio Jardim, “with tables among lush plants and flowers in a garden.”

The highlight of Carnival are the parades in the Sambadrome, and we attend the important ones including the Parade of Champions of the six highest rated groups, captured in the book with exhilarating photos. The tiger on the cover is from a parade, and the book has a sequence of four photos of this tiger as it moves along the parade route.

Many residents, he says, pass on the parades and focus on the neighborhood street parties called blocos. He brings us to a variety, including one for children on Sunday morning in Ipanema, where the kids’ objectives seem to be grabbing onto as many balloon strings as possible and releasing them in the air, and blowing bubbles at each other.

Rio is a center of the soccer world, and we attend a league championship match with the city’s most popular team, Flamengo. Unfortunately, Steve’s ticket from a street vendor is on the opposition side, but he nevertheless captures some great action photos. He tells us that he had last been in Maracana stadium for the 2014 soccer World Cup.

After Carnival, the author visits the coast and takes a short cruise with the objective of entering Rio harbor at sunrise to relive a memory of his first cruise, from Cape Town to Rio, on the Queen Elizabeth 2 ship. On the way home, he stops in Manaus, the main town on the Amazon River, for an excursion into the rainforest. Besides what seems to be a dangerous group swim not far from a pod of hippos, on an early morning hike, he steps in a hole filled with wasps and is bitten all over. Steve manages to take a picture of his hand at twice the normal size. “No infections, thank goodness.”

He says he wrote the section “Planning a Memorable Carnival” because this information was not available for his planning. It is specific in how, when, and what including what to avoid, which surprisingly is the reserved seat section. Sit in an unreserved section and in the middle of the Sambadrome, he says; get there early and grab your perfect front row seat; “and enjoy one of the great spectacles of your life.”

I’ve read other books by Steve Kaffen, and this one is up to their standard, although I think he outdid himself with the photography, even though he says that it is difficult to take a bad photo at Carnival.

If one of his objectives was to generate interest in attending a future Carnival in Rio, let me say that it’s now on my travel bucket list. I think the book will help put Carnival on yours too.

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Biography of Reviewer N. Waheed Nasser:

Waheed Nasser served as an Auditor in the Peace Corps Office of Inspector General 2002-2006 and 2011-2016. Waheed has also worked at USAID, the Special IGs for Afghanistan and Iraq Reconstruction, and Department of the Army’s Internal Review Office in Saudi Arabia and Miami, and currently, for a three-year period, in Wiesbaden, Germany. He has three grown children and is an avid traveler and photographer.

Carnival in Rio is available on Amazon.